It’s 1783 and all is not well in the once-peaceful island city of Venice. As the proverb goes, ‘Venetians are born lazy and live to sleep’. A mysterious foreigner called Fogfinger has discovered how to exploit both the Venetians’ laziness and their famous craving for novelty … by supplying them with a never-ending stream of clicking, clanking and chattering automata: delightful mechanical toys and picturesque devices to make the lives of the rich a pure pleasure.

No need to turn the page of a book, if you are a nobleman in Venice. There’s a machine for that. You can choose your favourite dessert from a revolving cake-stand. Would you like some music? A wind-up rabbit will oblige. Nor need you climb into your gondola: a moving walkway rolls you in. Even in the smallest room in the house, there is an automaton to help. The rich are growing ever more pampered. They have forgotten what their fingers and muscles and hearts are for.

Automata from the music box museum in Utrecht: photo by Charles Hutchins on Wikimedia Commons

The secret ramp inside the Frari’s bell-tower

The automata are wound up each night by a population of slaves known as the Winder Uppers. The poor, whose jobs have been stolen by the mechanical devices, are just getting poorer. A single stolen green apricot can be the difference between a hungry day and a good one.

And there’s another cost: the sacrifice – known as the ‘Lambing’ – of two children each year to placate the ‘Judas Crocodile’ which lurks in the lagoon, according to Fogfinger, having treacherously delivered up its mate to assure a supply of fresh children for itself. No one knows what happens to the little human Lambs who make the long, terrifying walk up the mysterious bell-tower of the Frari to face the Fate in the Box that will decide their destiny: only one thing is certain – most are never seen again.

The church of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, known as ‘the Frari’

Blue glass seahorse, reproduced from an image of an antique one by Marco Vettor of www.murano export.com

Strangely, it is the children of the poor who are always selected for Lambing. Only a few citizens dare to protest. And the Piccoli Pochi, as these brave men and women are known, are ruthlessly hunted down. Secrecy is paramount. They know one another only by the talisman carried by all their members: a blue glass seahorse. Meanwhile, the idle rich are drawn to the Natural History Museum, where stuffed animals killed by Fogfinger on his safaris in Africa are luridly displayed in a state of twitching half-life. More than anything, the Venetians love to stare at the vast skeleton of the crocodile betrayed by its mate.

Outside, the wells of Venice are drying up, the flowers are withering, and people cannot afford to send their sons and daughters to school. Spying devices in the shape of tiny ears are embedded in walls. Poxers spray the spores of a wasting disease on noisy children. Venice has become a town without her old spiritual comforts: even the priests have been sent into exile. The churches are now staffed by mechanical monkeys who deliver Fogfinger’s sermons. And all day long the statues of the town chatter to one another, spreading unreliable rumours.

The Rio dei Mendicanti, the quarter of the cloth-dyers

The two worlds of Venice – privilege and poverty – collide when Amneris D’Ago, a young seamstress from the cloth-dyers’ quarter, is sent to deliver an embroidered parasol to Latenia Malipiero, the daughter of a noble lawyer – a spoilt, vicious girl whose mother has vanished and brought down an unexplained disgrace on the whole family.

The Festival of the Redentore

The fragile new friendship between the two girls will soon be tested to the limit – when Amneris and her two friends Tockle and Biri are chosen for Lambing and Latenia is forced into a hateful Betrothal with Fogfinger. Both terrible events are due to take place at the spectacular summer Festival of the Redentore.

Meanwhile, Fogfinger is assembling an army of dead animals reanimated as automata. But against whom will this ferocious army be deployed? What has happened to the Ark that was supposed to take hundreds of poor Venetians to the paradise island of Hvar – but never arrived? Who will stop Venice from turning into a clockwork trap for her own people, and save her young citizens from Lambing?

Photo of Austrian furriers, 1905 from Wikimedia Commons

House of the Spirits, home of the mermaids, by Jenny Lovric

A fierce opposition to Fogfinger is stirring in a cavern under the House of the Spirits where warrior mermaids are cultivating Seaweed Familiars to help in the forthcoming battle for the hearts and minds of the Venetians. And something is afoot in a prison in the Doge’s Palace, where an old sea captain with a genius for mechanical devices has been imprisoned for nearly twenty years.

Soon there are flayed deer flying and dead apes walking – but whose side will these creatures take?

Drawing on the legend of St George and the Dragon, this story explores the idea of sacrifice and the dangerous passivity that is brought on by both fear and bedazzlement. It also takes a look at human ingenuity – is it, as the mermaids ask, ‘a boon or a bust’? The answer depends, it seems, on the kind of humans and the kind of ingenuity: the story features sinister devices, a magical kaleidoscope with a secret inside and a hot-air balloon laboriously sewn from seamstresses’ scraps. It is also a story about friendship and bravery, about the twisting of good faith, about different kinds of parenting, and different ways of being a child.

Although readers will recognise the magical real Venice of previous books such as The Undrowned Child and Talina in the Tower, The Fate in the Box is a stand-alone read.

Amneris D’Ago is a young Venetian seamstress. She has rich brown curls and an old-fashioned kind of prettiness, but a very modern talent for mathematics. Her family have been making beautiful embroidery for generations. More recently, their patterns have come from their most treasured possession, an old kaleidoscope, which came floating into Venice with the family’s name, along with a mysterious inscription, written on the box. It is Amneris’s work to draw the patterns that the kaleidoscope produces and to calculate how much expensive silk thread she needs to buy. After a series of meetings and adventures deliver her into the clutches of Fogfinger, it will be Amneris’s fate to climb to the top of the Frari bell-tower and discover whether the Fate in the Box will burst open to show her the beautiful Madonna that will save her life – or the skull that will mean her instant death.

Temistocle Molin (known as ‘Tockle’) is the son of a bigolante, one of the women who walk around Venice selling fresh water from pails that hang from a yoke on their shoulders. These women wear top hats so people can see them in the crowded streets. At eleven, Temistocle’s the man of the house, charged with looking after his mother and sisters since his father disappeared – he’s suspected of being with the Piccoli Pochi. Fate too delivers Tockle a chance to find out a painful truth …

Biri – (real name ‘Ermintrudina’) Fava has been alone in Venice since her parents were sent into exile for being members of the Piccoli Pochi. She has grown up tough, sleeping on a shelf in a stone-mason’s warehouse. She scratches out a living using a trained parrot and a sharp mind. Her clothes are rags, held together with safety pins and clothes pegs, but she’s too proud to accept much help from the family of her friend Amneris. Biri loves insects – including cockroaches and moths – and even talks to them. What is more unusual is that the insects speak back to Biri, something that will come in very useful as Fogfinger’s plot against Venice thickens.

Latenia Malipiero is the spoilt, vain daughter of a noble lawyer. She loves cake, automata and making the lives of all around her as miserable as possible. She collects ornate tortoiseshell hair combs, caring nothing for the animals that died to make them. But her own life, as Latenia is soon forced to realize, is as pointless as that of her pet goldfish, forced to swim around fancy glass bowls that are too small for them. Although she lives in grandeur in a palace on the Grand Canal, things are not what they seem in Latenia’s noble family. For a start, no one knows where her mother is. And why does her father give Latenia everything she demands, but without ever smiling at her?

Even Latenia is afraid of Maffeo, her equally spoilt older brother. He’s also addicted to the latest novelty in automata. He’s a member of the Compagnia della Calza, otherwise known as the Fancy Stockings – a group of young noblemen who spend their time playing cruel pranks on the poor. Maffeo decides to win Fogfinger’s favour by betraying his sister and her friends, despite being cat-cursed with the worst toothache in the world since day one, ever.

Maffeo’s sulky looks are based on those of the Young man with a book by Lorenzo Lotto (picture from Wikimedia Commons)

None of Michelle Lovric’s Venetian adventures would be complete without some talking, flying cats. In The Fate in the Box, the cats of Venice face a danger all of their own. Fogfinger, a cat-hater, has introduced ‘The Kittening’, a cruel version of the Lambing that has taken so many Venetian children.

Baffi (meaning ‘Whiskers’) is Tockle’s troublesome pet. He is friends with Grillo, the cat who belongs to Amneris, and Shaveling, the resident feline &nbsp at Fogfinger’s &nbsp palace.

The mermaids: Lussa, Chissa and the other mermaids will be familiar to readers of The Undrowned Child and The Mourning Emporium. Unlike the usual mermaids of fairytales, these Venetian sirens speak rough as guts and devour fiery curries. They have hot hearts and hot heads to match.

The Frari

Caffè Florian

Fondaco dei Turchi

The ‘Galleggiante’, a feature of the old Redentore festival and part of the story

Man and Wife by Lorenzo Lotto. The faces of Latenia’s parents are based on these portraits (picture from Wikimedia Commons)

I had almost as many adventures writing this book as you will find between the covers. Researching The Fate in the Box involved climbing the second tallest bell-tower in Venice, attending the Redentore, a waterborne festival of fireworks that takes place each July, drinking a lot of Venetian hot chocolate at Caffè Florian and spending a great deal of time in the wonderful Natural History Museum at the Fondaco dei Turchi in Venice. I found some of the faces of my characters at a wonderful exhibition of Lorenzo Lotto’s portraits at the Accademia Gallery. I also bought a large number of crocodiles on eBay for bookshop window displays and commissioned a hand-made Venetian blue glass seahorse based on an antique one I saw at a museum. I had to sail up and down the Grand Canal at least twenty times to photograph all the statues who garble an important message in Chinese whispers all the way from San Samuele to San Marcuola. I had to imagine the voice and personality behind each stone face. I have written – and shall write – about many of these things on the History Girls website, where I am one of nearly thirty historical novelists who each contribute a blog once a month. My day is the 10th of each month.